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Episode #69 Interview with Daniel Van Heerden
10 Mar 2022 |
10 Mar 2022 |
On this episode of the NTP podcast we interview Daniel Van Heerden, Software Development Manager at Biscit. We talk about his experience working in Newcastle, how working from home affected his team, his perspective on university as a pathway into technology and transitioning from a technical role into a people management role.
Hope you enjoy the episode!
Here you can source all the things we have talked about in the podcast whether that be books, events, meet-up groups and what’s new in the newcastle tech scene.
(00:30)
Can you give us a quick overview of your role as Software Development Manager at Biscit?
(02:20)
What interested you to get into a career in technology?
(06:00)
For those younger who want to start a career in tech would you recommend university or short courses as a pathway into software development?
(09:41)
What is your perspective on transitioning into people management or staying more technical?
(14:00)
What has been your experience working locally in Lake Macquarie?
(27:00)
What has been your experience working remotely?
(34:30)
What would be advice you would give to your younger self?
(12:27)
Why did you stay in Newcastle?
(13:40)
Growing a company in Newcastle, any challenges or benefits?
(35:00)
What is the best way for our listeners to get in touch with you?
welcome to the first new tech people podcast for myself at 2022 on today’s episode we’ve got dan van heerden from biscuit software development manager at biscuit um based here in newcastle and uh for those of you who who don’t know who you are they can give us a bit of an overview uh yeah sure hello um so dan van hidden and uh yeah i’ve been in newcastle for probably coming up two and a half years now yeah i started my career probably in 2001 uh worked on the old vb.bb6 stack uh all the way and then went to london and worked in net there for quite a while and companies like vodafone and um smaller companies as well and some contract work and then moved over to perth where i was working for student edge um some of the younger people might know that worked there for about five years built a new website back then and um that’s where i kind of started moving into more leadership roles yeah i then got kind of head hunted by um rs insurance um and yeah basically from there uh i was the developer manager there for what they call a capability lead there yeah for the developers and that then transitioned over into applying for the job at biscuit yeah that’s how i came over to newcastle yeah nice um you’ve obviously you’ve done south africa you’ve done england you’ve done perth now newcastle yeah obviously some different experiences along there you’ve been here for two years now what’s your uh what’s your experience been like working here in newcastle well it’s it’s been good uh we are i had a bit of a culture shock when i first got here coming from big city big city big city and then newcastle it ended up being actually really nice when we actually got into the swing of things and the way things move here is a little bit different to the big cities yeah i mean i enjoy it the people are good here people are friendly there’s some good talents around um so yeah i think uh enjoying it so far nice mate i’ll take that career and i’ll just dig in there a tiny bit maybe right back at the start yep um hey what what i compelled you to get into technology to start with uh so my mother was a computer science teacher yeah so you didn’t have a choice well yeah i kind of um she had textbooks lying around all the time and i think it was about 10 and i picked up a textbook yeah and i started messing around on the computer yeah by the time i got to high school i basically knew the curriculum for the high school uh for the entire high school year and so then went to uni and it was kind of engineering i.t engineering high tech and i think it was probably my math that made the decision for me then i just went okay i’ll just go i.t yeah and i’d like to be a cit then and that’s the rest is history on that point you’ve now one of my favorite questions and uh on this podcast uh university and education for people especially in the tech industry software development in particular what was your experience like going through university let’s start what was your experience like and then we’ll dig a bit deeper i loved it it was great um it was uh my first year was a bit of a right half because just kind of the freedom of just being out and about and with mates and just partying basically 24 7. uh so that was a bit of a right or from a study point of view but yeah after that got into it got it done and yeah it was fun i mean they don’t teach you what you need in a job but they teach you very they’re very good at kind of putting the foundation down and giving the fundamentals right for you and i think that’s very important and i think that’s probably what self-taught people that don’t go through that university you sometimes miss is that those fundamentals they just go straight to the coding yeah um so yeah from that point of view it’s really good that’s an interesting take and a pretty common take to be honest i i feel like a lot of people in the tech space in particular that have done university degrees it’s not actually what you’re going to do in your day-to-day job but does teach you both fundamentals of technology but also uh teaching you how to learn i think that’s the second one like yeah it’s hard to think and how to structure things and it’s it’s just that that ability to think about things kind of progressively getting more complicated rather than just jumping right in the end which i think happens if you if you don’t aren’t kind of forced through that a couple of times during university and then you get you if you just go straight into it yourself you kind of go okay well i have to get this done i have to make this work and you just make it work yeah and you don’t really understand the fundamentals of the things underlying it so yeah definitely from that point of view how to learn how things are structured how to actually learn things properly so you actually know what you’re doing not just doing it um is definitely valuable from a university i’m sure you can get the same out of like a diploma or something like that um i’ve um i’ve got some guys who’s got diplomas i’ve got some guys whose good degrees i’ve got some of the characters got nothing self-taught yeah and there’s different differences in the way they approach problems yeah which is always very interesting to kind of see yeah um when i get somebody in who i know doesn’t have that background i actually take them through i just set out a couple of lengthy learning courses for them it’s like go back to the basics get the fundamentals yeah then do another course that show you how to actually apply the fundamentals and then go get on and actually start coding so that you can actually just understand where everything’s coming from right you’ve brought up couple pieces here which i’m going to try to dig into i’m going to try to remember them all um oh phrase this way you’ve got a 10 year old son right yep let’s say he wants to be a software developer yeah he’s got he’s got available to him university yep he’s got available to him linkedin learning yeah he’s got code academy he’s got other he’s got youtube yep if you if he says dad want to be a software developer um obviously the quicker he’s employed the quicker he’s earning money if he goes to university he’s putting that back by potentially three years or maybe he’s maybe he’s coding while he’s at university if you if if you have to provide him some advice in you know we’re 2022 at the moment how would you try to encourage him and it might not be the answer for the same person for every person but just keen to see your opinion i would encourage my son to go to university that i would do that but aside from that university only takes you so far it won’t make you stand out right well i guess if you even if you even if you get all the best marks in university i think you’ll get head hunted by some of the top firms and stuff but i feel like once you’re in the position you’ll still struggle if you just have the university behind you a good thing nowadays that people have access to is open source projects so i would actually encourage him to get involved get involved in some open source projects create a couple of pull requests throw it up onto open source project get some feedback they let them tell you what you’re doing wrong and then get a pull request merge into one of the open source projects or something like that yeah where you’re actually part of a a greater collective actually trying to achieve something and i think that’s always that’s the power of the current information age where kind of this hive of information and things that’s at your disposal and you can become part of that or you can try and just feed off that but i think it’s better to just be part of that and kind of learn how to work in that system and then you can yeah so open source projects read a lot of blog posts don’t just assume you know the answer always even if you’ve done it before you still don’t know the answer go back and reassess it again and read again and all that so yeah yeah that’s an interesting take um i don’t i really like that take actually it’s not one i’ve heard before one of the things that i guess we’ve we when i’m recreating if i was a junior and someone going through university or somebody that’s done a code academy or something like that it would be to build something build something publish it online like get get something live build a game build a website build something to show that you’ve actually gone through that process and it’s not just theoretical knowledge yeah i feel like you know you get some code up there um get other people looking at it i feel like that just as you said helps people stand out yeah yeah and and it also to test like you were saying just make them hold something yeah um again that by itself anybody can make it work yeah right but they have to actually really you want to look at how they approached it right yeah that they they think about the fundamentals that they set up the project correctly that they they build the code properly that they write nice clean code that they think about fundamentals not just make it work it’s it’s always that the difference between a software developer sorry a coder and a software engineer right a coder can make stuff work that’s great right a software engineer will structure build make things scalable make things maintainable long term so you want to see them almost instinctively naturally do that or follow that process as a junior it’s a forced thing right as a junior you have to see they they’re following a process that they’ve learned yeah right as a senior it just has to be second nature nah i i really enjoy the taste um maybe if we go further on the career then um you you’ve you’ve finished your university degree and as you said i think it’s the past five seven years that you’ve worked more in a sort of software development manager type role yeah um i guess there’s interesting pathways for software engineers you can either stay super technical and be hands-on coding and never take on people management and just be a really strong technical software engineer and still earn a lot of money right yeah or you can start to take on that team management route which is the route that you’ve gone can you just talk to me about that transition period for you as in going from day to day banging our code to starting to think more around you know building teams managing teams yeah i think i think starting our point is you need to not be in a job where you’re banging out code if you if you’re on that job you’re on the wrong job you know even as a junior yeah right you need to be from the start you need to look for the job where you are part of a team and you’re working as a collective and you’re achieving something you’re learning deaf practices you’re learning code quality practices you’re learning all these things that make software work and scale and grow right if you’re in that scenario if you’re in that kind of ecosystem right you learn all those skills right and by the time you learn them the new juniors are coming in right and you get like you said you get the people who just want to stay technical right they usually just become mentors sometimes they i kind of see them as going the architect route yeah right um and they just they start focusing more on it it’s really hard right irrespective of which way you go right what you’re actually doing is you’re getting closer to the business yeah so if you’re if you’re going down the architect route right you’re starting to because you understand the ecosystem right you’re starting to work with the business and then find projects and how to apply projects within that ecosystem effectively that’s what architect does yeah it’s a technical business analyst right right um so you’re still closer to the business you’re still not really cutting code anymore yeah always if you’re architect or you can just be a super senior developer who’s just cutting code and that’s what you love doing and that’s what you get your kicks out of and people i’ve known a lot of people like that in my life and they don’t actually go either way they just stay senior developer yeah they sometimes specialize i know a guy who specialized in um in big data for example right so he specialized and the specialization then made him and more and more and more yeah right whereas um but you have to care for your specialization doesn’t put you in a box yeah you have to you have to keep your specialization broad enough then don’t be specialized in power bi that when that project product goes out of scope then you have a job right you want to be a big data specialist right or something right and then they might browse the people and they just come out of the woodwork by themselves right it’s the people who who start leading all right they just start leading they just it just happens right and um and especially the people who you can see they’re leading and they’re uplifting the people around them those are the people that management then start looking at and going ah okay well lead this project for me this project for me and then once you’ve done it yeah uh if you’ve done this for a couple of years even if it’s not your official role you can you can just can apply for a role as a leadership role somewhere else and you’ll usually get it because you’ve got that those skills those skills but yeah it’s just it’s from from day one from don’t be a lone horseman sitting in a corner coding yeah you don’t want to be that because you’re never going to go to leadership from there or even architecture from there you want to be part of a team structure so it sounds like it was less of a conscious decision to want to be a people manager more if it played your strengths you obviously took on mentorship you took on management and just grew from there basically really at student edge that’s exactly what happened i just i was sitting in a team of developers they hired other developers around me and i just became the de facto leader yeah they actually hired a um a lead over our team but he wasn’t technical yeah so i just ended up becoming the technical lead and he started referring to me as a technical leader and i just that which was just what happened um and so yeah so when i went over to rsc insurance i just said i want to be in a lead role still yeah and i went through a small technical lead stint and then i went into leadership so leadership doesn’t you know come without its challenges right yeah and then a couple of years ago cove comes out of the blue and you’re leading a team through covert pandemic you know you would have had to lead a team going from your predominantly you know you’ve got you’ve got your uh office down near lake macquarie there yeah people are in the office five days a week um obviously some flags in there but yeah predominantly on site and then click of finger everyone’s fully remote uh how was that experience for you as a leader for my team in particularly it was a bit weird because um it was a very young team when we started and even when this we started breaking up it was we hired probably more than half of our team during covert yeah so uh a lot of the but it was certainly a challenge i mean i remember frantically scrambling to get a vpn up yeah and frankly scrambling to get all these kind of things set up and um you know all the um what do you call it sitting at the desk properly and all that kind of stuff getting better economics getting people to fill in forms of their home systems trying to get nice kits for them whatever just keep the ball rolling right so that was it was a bit manic in the beginning um but i think once we got into it it was fairly uh it just kind of worked it actually worked very well in the beginning so yeah and then you kind of i feel like everything it kind of becomes a bit of a rut yeah and i feel like that’s kind of we’re heading that way now everybody’s getting a little fatigue of working from home yeah and they wanting to come back a little bit more i feel like uh yeah everyone’s supposed to go remote and everyone enjoyed aspects of that yeah uh remote in the future i think maybe a little different uh there’s people that are definitely uh looking for that office interaction human interaction there’s some people that have loved full remote and will never go back to an office so i feel like it’ll be a bit of a horses because like every individual will react differently but it’d be interesting to see how businesses who are forced to go remote you know then operate post pandemic i actually think the biggest challenge coming up is how do you manage that mix yeah right because you’re gonna have some people working remotely and some people working in the office and even before the pandemic started right if you had people working remotely they often got overlooked for promotional stuff they often got overlooked just for getting opportunities all those kind of things they got overlooked for yeah if half your team is working remotely you have to not have that happen you have to be very careful yeah about making sure people still get the opportunities that they would have when they were in the office if it’s a split thing so i think that’s going to be a big challenge yeah well we’ve done the same thing as an organization gone remote first like all communication now gets done remotely doesn’t yet it’s not the meeting in the office where everyone not but three or four people find out um it’s you know everything all the communications have to be online i feel like as you said there’s some challenges it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out longer term yeah yeah definitely um when you went remote was there any tools uh software that you guys use that you thought would ah we did everything through teams really so that was easy we use jrr boards and things like that like the kanmen boards for work so yeah just really teams yeah for video calls um i’ve known the organization you work for biscuit for many years now and there’s been quite an evolution there yeah from it’s one of those companies i think that uh is interesting from the perspective of you know scratching your own itch and then that turning into another product as well uh consultancy background which turned into both obviously consultancy but now another arm through uh assassins can you give people a bit of an overview of what you’re working on at the moment or some of the exciting projects you’ve been working on coming up yeah sure um well our main app that we have it’s like a warehouse management app um the some of the companies refer to it as the gun app so it’s like it sits on the barcode scanning guns yeah um and that it’s it’s actually a very it sits on top of big um erp back-end system and so you kind of uh it just does a lot of the warehouse functionality for that for you so a lot of the flows and things is automated through the app um and that kind of stuff so we’re always building that out we’re actually just about to start a big project to actually uplift that whole thing a little bit so that’s always in the background because it’s probably our biggest single product that we have yeah um then we also do a lot of integrations so that took off like crazy uh probably a year or two ago yeah uh we did a few people got wind of it and it just it just got quite crazy so now again erp integrations with things like store francis popular like shopify and ecommerce and that kind of stuff but also financial systems just staff management creating accounts all that kind of stuff just those kind of integrations and then we’ve also started because of our success with the big app um started people started approaching us for smaller bespoke apps that also kind of sits in that on that same kind of back-end ecosystem of the erp so we’ve built dispatch boards and all kinds of stuff that then sits on top of that as well so yeah that’s very varied if it’s a very mixed bag of projects that we’re involved in yeah they always have some connection points somewhere with with the erp system yeah um some more than others we’ve got a rental management system which can stand on its own but it also has a tight integration with with that erp so yeah it’s interesting we’ve got lots of little lots of moving parts and lots of different kind of projects all the time so it’s good it keeps it interesting yeah what i find interesting and i think it’s um there’s a lot of businesses sort of start out i guess not pure software development businesses to start with but then software software development opportunities present themselves you know creating bespoke apps for example and then hey if you create that one happens some people more people more people are looking for that turning that into a product in itself and then selling that product as a sas offering i think it’s quite interesting as opposed to starting out as a pure you know pure software development company or an app company yeah i i think or from my experience i’ve seen a lot of companies had a lot of success with that because you’ve got a core business you understand the customers you understand their needs and then your your building software for a customer is actually paying for it rather than you going out and building software from the start without that customers there yeah exactly and i think the well the customers is one thing that’s that’s great because we we tap into that that customer base right but i think it’s just great to have the customer base but from us from the knowledge point of view the customers tend to have access to the same things that we do but because we’ve got this breadth of knowledge behind us we we tend to make things just work and work and do it quicker and because we’ve got the consulting side of the business and we’ve got the development side of the business the consultants is always there to draw from so when you’re building all these things sometimes just just having those consultants say to go and ask simple questions for that’s something that a lot of these companies struggle with if they’re trying to do it by themselves so we we have that on tap right next to us and we can just get information straight out and actually do things much quicker yeah i just think it provides you such a such an advantage over a company who’s building you know let’s call it a starter for from scratch building it up you’re investing and building software without actually you know you can build an mvp and try that with customers along the way and then iterate and build and build but having those consultants you can tap into the customers having those pieces that core information yeah expanded within the business just provides you such a better opportunity it’s like a superpower yeah to actually have some success with that yeah it’s great and like i said because it’s so varied um it actually gives a challenge for them as well because they end up having to think about the eop in a way they haven’t thought about it before so um for the dispatch um mechanism for example uh fleet management and that kind of stuff that’s all different ways of thinking about the erp and how does how does eop feed into that and how does it work and how do we send information back into that so it’s all challenges yeah nice you’ve talked a bit about leadership you’re talking a little bit about the company at the moment um one of the challenges across australia at the moment is a lack of talent in australia i think um through the pandemic we obviously lost a lot of people on school visas borders have been closed more and more companies investing in technology talent shortage across the board you’ve talked about leadership you talked about what you guys are building at the moment what are the things that you look for in trying to hire people into your teams yeah i think it’s kind of what i was talking about before it’s about somebody who can work at a team so we can be part of a cohesive team yeah at biscuit i don’t assign work to individuals ever i always assign work to teams and so and i think that’s that’s becoming more common way of doing things anyway um so being able to find somebody who is who can comfortably hook into that kind of team and kind of contribute to their team and kind of feel and yeah both actually get something out of the team but actually put something back into the team yeah those kind of things is good and then obviously technical talent is important as well yeah and when it comes to technical talent it’s always about those people again like i said in the beginning about um being able to show me that they can think from progressively like starting from the fundamentals and working their way up rather than just starting right at the top yeah if you had a choice between taking somebody with the technical chops but not that team player attitude or the team player attitude without the technical jobs probably go with the team player and i have in the past and it’s actually worked out very well for me so it’s always a tough choice you you when you’re interviewing you’ve got one position or two positions to fold right sometimes if you’re lucky you have the opportunity to interview 15 20 people yeah right so then you get that conundrum very often it’s like this guy’s very very strong technically but he’s not a good team player um or this guy’s a great team player he’s okay technically um he can probably hold his own but he’s a great team player and he’ll he’ll do well in team and so i generally error on those guys just because it’s it they actually achieve more with their team than the guys who’s trying to fight their team constantly to get to get things done their way yeah yeah always yeah i agree i think also if you can overlay they might not have the technical know-how at the moment but they’ve shown ability to learn in the past and it might have been learning a new subject might have been learning something brand new yeah the ability to learn overlaid with a good attitude or a team player i think you know will set you up long term um because especially in software development right there’s a very good chance at some point within the next couple of years they’re going to have to learn a new language or a new framework or something else and if they’ve got that ability to learn yeah um yeah that’ll be well you can tell that an interview pretty quickly yeah they will they will say it over and over again um in an interview the fact that they like to learn and and especially the guys who can bring up examples right the guys who are sitting in the in the interview and he’s saying i’ve done this example as opposed to just robotically telling you i do learning you’re like okay that’s nice okay let’s carry on yeah versus the guys who’s saying i love i love reading the linkedin articles i love doing this so you know udemy is my favorite or whatever we they start using examples and you know they’re talking the truth right and then you know they actually actually those kind of people who want to learn so it’s easy to pick them out in the interviews i completely agree and uh on pandemic or post pandemic i guess to an extent at the moment potentially how have you guys managed that are you a couple of days back in the office you’re looking at a bit of a hybrid or fully remote approach what’s it look like for you and your team going forward i don’t think we’ve completely figured it out yet i think it’s forever going to be more flexible than it has been for us right now we’re fully remote still mostly and i think we’re gonna start trickling in back into the office just trying to get people in maybe not all of them at a time maybe a team at a time or a couple of people at a time or or maybe just even just meeting for a drink yeah right just starting to bring the people back slowly um you just don’t know at the moment we’ve been in again again and again out again over the course of the pandemic because i mean when the first variant died down a little bit everybody started coming back and then delta came out and everybody went back to the office and then that’s sort of dying down again so everybody came back to the office and the um is back yeah and it’s just like it’s almost more disruptive to just to do that so everybody is now i think a little bit hesitant to just bring people back again you’re like let’s just stay where we are let’s meet up as much as we can yeah um and just actually make sure that it’s actually gone now yeah before we all bring everything back and because then it’s all carrying computer screens and things into the office and setting up everything again yeah yeah and then how’s that affected your life obviously you’re managing your team um you’ve got two kids uh life two kids um you know managing a team covert no more commute um has it been a thing where because you don’t have to close your computer at you know five six whatever it might be you work through the nine you spend more time in front of there how’s it affected your life uh i’ve my whole life has been really good at actually switching off which i think it’s just my personality or something but i i tend to switch off when i’m done with work i’m done with work for the day um so that from that point of view i’ve been okay working at home has been challenging at times and noisy at times especially when homeschooling was going at the same time yeah as you can imagine um everybody can relate so it’s affected me in that sense um yeah uh but yeah we’re managing i think the the hard part from a work point of view is just how do you monitor performance when you don’t see the people right and that’s really hard because metrics don’t tell the full story right so then you need to find other ways and yeah yeah there’s definitely some challenges i feel like most companies are trying to figure different aspects out i don’t think i don’t think most companies have everything sorted yet um it’ll be interesting to see how the next couple years play out um and i think it’ll be different company company and individual to individual because uh people start to figure out what their cadence is like with being back in an office we’re communing with being around other humans with wanting to work remote and i think that’ll just vary person to person and i think we’ll get to a point where some companies are fully remote and will stay that way some companies will be a hybrid approach and we’ll be happy to sort of you know stick their flag in the ground saying we are hybrid like you can come in here and see you know say other humans if that’s what you look um and that won’t suit the people that want fully remote so i feel like we’ll get to that point where you know people will know what they want and know um what suits them and then yeah pick and choose that way with all this going on how do you structure your day do you use any software do you use a calendar tool to use a to-do list is there any software anything you use to manage your day um i’ve actually started using a tool called air focus that’s fairly new thing um and it yeah it was it was introduced to me by um i think greg introduced me to some business coach guy and he just mentioned that some company was using it yeah that he was coaching and it’s actually it’s it’s it’s just a way of high level planning yeah um it’s really good it’s got like uh you know the general gantt charts and it’s got um it’s called kanban boards and it’s got um like it can actually help you figure out you know the the high value and the difficulty kind of projects kind of figure that out and kind of place it so you know what’s the quick ones and the strategic bits and so it’s just a nice tool for that high level planning yeah and we actually now do um i do all my high level planning on that just the project the pipeline all that kind of planning i use that for yeah and we’ve actually started slowly but surely um we do company-wide um meetings now we call them uh project alignment meetings where we do uh we look at that board and we all go through the wall together and go okay so what’s coming up where is this ad but they’re still on design this is still in pre-sales is this way as the service is ready to go yeah whatever and so yeah it’s really good tool it’s a good way to sort of get alignment across the business when you as you said you’ve got a software development at the aspect you’ve got consultants you’ve got the actual business itself yeah like getting that alignment yeah i think i think the consultant still um it’s more we i’m only really use it for the overlap yeah um and for development at this point the consulting stuff works a bit differently yeah but yeah it’s yeah it’s working very well so far for me nice so you work out for the high level stuff and then you know the mind unit stuff is a g is a calendar yeah it goes to jira yeah you mean just normal yeah calendar yeah um but yeah but uh the teams work with jira so it goes from that high level focus board and it goes a card on that becomes an epic in jail yeah then the team’s not breaking it down yeah very nice um from a continuing education perspective for yourself i think you just mentioned business coach is a business coach books are your reader or your podcast listener um what do you do to continue you know your career growth i i read i read a lot of blogs i think that’s basically why i use things but it’s it’s usually better the way i function is a little bit reactive it’s usually i’m getting into situations which i don’t know the answer and even though i think i know the answer i generally don’t know the full answer um so my i’m blogging on linkedin quite a bit and what i’ll do is i’ll just write down my thinking in a blog post yeah and i won’t publish it sometimes i’ll sit there six months before i publish it because then i’ll go read blog posts and refine and kind of kind of talk to people and kind of do experiments in my team and see how things pan out and whatever and then that’s kind of how i kind of structure my thinking about okay how do i proceed with this and then i usually publish something when i’m done yeah so that’s usually how i do my learning is there any blogs in particular or is it you’ll pick a subject as you said or a problem and then go deep dive into one section rather than hey there’s a that go-to blog that you know helps all the people yeah it’s more like that i think there’s there’s too much opinions out there and i feel if you pick one guy if you’re like i’m using jeff’s blog as my guidance yeah you get one guy’s opinion you want to hive that you and everybody right you want all those opinions and then make your own opinion all for that so i think that’s yeah yeah i don’t disagree if you are if you took it all together and uh you know rounded back to a young version yourself is there any like key piece of advice you would give yourself to say hey my time over i think i actually just it’s funny it’s really my whole career right various people have told me this piece of advice in different kind of ways yeah and i never got it i seriously i never got it until about three or four years ago right and the the basic of the advice is don’t react right and i actually somebody posted something on linkedin the other day which actually put it slightly better he said they say um observe and learn instead of reacting yeah instead of reacting because not everything needs your reaction save your energy for what matters and i think that is that is so so important it’s just that ability and that’s what i tell myself is just stop slow down listen more right and read more and absorb more before you give an opinion and i say that to a lot of the junior guys that i’m into it’s like anybody so anybody can jump to and give a reaction right and just that obvious answer right but if the senior people sitting around you in a room there’s probably a reason they’re not saying that yeah right it’s not because they don’t know it oh they don’t have an opinion they don’t have an opinion they actually they actually have already dismissed that for some reason right you’re blurting it out and now you’re actually making more problem because now the business person’s guessed that and so i think it’s just that kind of keeping quiet observing learning hearing what everybody’s saying and then right at the end if you have actually something valuable to add at that because that’s actually going to save the day but don’t react with a re with her with the solution in anything you do in life really don’t react to solutions i think that’s probably my key advice that i’ll give your younger self ah i would definitely give that version to a 20 20s version of myself i remember yeah starting out my career and you know being in a meeting room and wanting to be that person i’ve got an opinion and and wanted to be heard whereas as you said people have been around a lot longer who know a lot more other ones being quiet in those rooms taking a lot more listening before talking um yeah what i thought i knew back then that’s what i actually knew were two different things i think it’s just a it’s a common thing for younger people it’s like uh i don’t know what it is i don’t know what we thought i can’t remember what i was thinking back then but i did the same thing i just reacted with the first solution and that’s not great and it actually derails things more than it actually helps normally yeah so yeah just observing learning actually understanding the ecosystem understanding the problem understanding what’s there already and i think that’s something that a lot of juniors also don’t like to do they’re like that that’s that’s they’re already as crap that that should be better and they just want to kind of rewrite it yeah but actually having taken the time to actually go and look at that and you know why is it like that why did they do it like that understanding that properly first yeah before you go diving and just changing and do it all over again and probably making the same mistake those people did and then going back to what they had originally so power and listening right powering taking that one step back yeah and um looking at it from you know one step back as opposed to being in in the furnace or yeah that decision wait i completely agree it’s uh that’s good advice and suffice i’d definitely give myself as well made uh thanks for the time today it was made it was really good for me i i enjoyed being back in a podcast face to face it’s been it’s been a while actually yeah um and so if people want to you know find out a little bit more about you or hey if they’ve got a question um is the best way for them to contact you on linkedin i think then it’s easy yeah yep i will link that up in the podcast notes on our website so nice man appreciate your time today no problem cheers
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